Address delivered on April 6, 1891



MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA



Gentlemen It occasionally happens that young persons
rush into matrimony with a keener sense of its delights than
of its obligations. Something of this sort happened when I
wooed your suffrages as a candidate for the Rectorship of
St. Andrews. The greatness of the honour, the pleasure of
being again associated with the district which was the
early home of my ancestors, and to which the instincts of
atavism have driven my daughter to return, so dazzled my
imagination that I did not sufficiently apprehend the re-
sponsibility of the task which I am now called upon to
perform. It is certainly no light matter for any one so
inadequately equipped as myself to engage in the per-
formance of a function which has been hitherto discharged
by one or other of the foremost men of the age, and which I
now feel would have been far better executed by he dis-
tinguished nobleman who entered into friendly competition
with me at the last election ; for, gentlemen, there is not
one of those who have hitherto spoken from this desk who
was not either a master of universal learning, or entitled by
his acquaintance with some special subject, or his eminence
in one or other of the learned professions, or the acknow-
ledged powers of his mind and the majesty of his age and
character, to speak to you with an authority to which it
would be presumptuous for me to pretend. I daresay,
indeed, were I inspired by less grateful feelings than those
which animate me at this moment, I might contrive to
clothe the commonplace observations usually current at
educational gatherings in sufficiently sounding language to



334 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

satisfy the decencies of the occasion ; but, when painfully
thinking over, as I have been for some time past, in what
style I should frame my present address, I determined that
the best return I could make to those who had shown me
so much kindness, but to whom I knew I was incompetent
to communicate anything worth their attention in regard
either to Science or Letters, would be to give them in as
simple and unpretending a manner as I could, such
practical hints in regard to some few of the matters which
will affect their start in life as my own personal experience
might furnish. In doing this my flight will naturally keep
to a very low and humble level ; but I take it for granted
that those young and ardent souls I see around me have
been so permeated and inspired by the combined spirit of
religion and patriotism which envelops this historic site,
and which has made Scotland what she is, that there is
already implanted deep and firm within their minds the
ever-present, all -pervading conviction that, beyond and
apart from the transitory aims and objects of personal
ambition or the prizes of a successful career, the one em-
ployment which makes life worth living or ourselves worthy
to live is the worship and service of our heavenly Father,
and a self-sacrificing devotion to the welfare and honour of
our country and of those who dwell within its borders.

Assuming, then, as a premiss that these two principles,
the love of God and the love of your native land, are to you
as the very breath of your nostrils, and the permanent as
well as the ultimate objects of your existence, I propose to
pretermit those loftier themes upon which my predecessors
have expatiated, and will confine myself to the considera-
tion of such subordinate topics as an ordinary man of the
world might presume to submit to such an audience. But,
at the outset, I wish it to be understood that there are two
classes of students who are not likely to profit by what I
have to say namely, those individuals whom Providence
may have endowed with the gift of divine genius, whose
hearts and lips have been touched by the living coal from
the altar, for genius in its essence is original and in-



MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND A VA 335

ventive, and reaches its ends by its own methods ; and
those golden youths, if any such there be among you, in
whose veins still leaps the blood of their Viking ancestors,
and who abhor the very sight of a book and the thought of
any sedentary occupation. To the former my observations
will seem superfluous, while to the latter they will prove as
useless as have proved to them for centuries the elaborate
machinery of all our great public schools, which continue
as heretofore to send forth into the world thousands and
thousands of generous and gallant young men, speaking no
language but their own, innocent of Latin and of Greek,
and as ignorant of the marvellous tissue of events recorded
in the history of past ages> or of the first principles of
those august sciences which minister to the civilisation of the
world as they were when they first went to school ; though,
on the other hand, able to give long odds to every nation
in Europe at cricket, polo, football, golf, curling, riding
across country, or any other athletic exercise, including
probably fighting. Whether the time will ever come when
our educational authorities will discover the secret of in-
doctrinating this excellent raw material with some tincture
of Letters and a suspicion of Learning, must remain a
matter of conjecture. It is devoutly to be wished that
they should do so ; for even fighting is becoming a matter
of scholarship. In Germany, I believe, some progress has
been made in that direction, accompanied, however, by the
disadvantage of putting a large percentage of the population
into spectacles.

Those, however, I have in view at present are such as
must always form the majority in an assembly like the
present young men who are now what I myself was at
your age, and therefore into whose feelings I can enter
neither particularly brilliant nor exceptionally dull, but
gifted with ordinary ability and with the powers of memory
and the habits of industry common to the bulk of all
university students.

The first piece of advice, then, I would give to what I may
call my audience proper, is to endeavour to reach a practical



336 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

conception both of the length and of the shortness of life.
According to the dictum of the Psalmist, every one of you
has a right to expect, if all goes well, some fifty years of
existence in other words, more than eighteen thousand
days. Now, all of you have probably already formed a
pretty good conception of what is meant by a thorough
day's work, and you will agree with me that a good deal
may be acquired and achieved during the course of eighteen
thousand days. In youth one's future life resembles a far
extending, nay, almost interminable plain ; but, though in-
terminable, the view of it is so choked and obscured by
the mists of uncertainty and of inexperience, that our actual
horizon remains extremely restricted. As a consequence,
the present, with its immediate purposes and enjoyments,
assumes undue importance in our eyes, and we undervalue
those more distant needs and advantages which we should
at once begin to provide against and secure. To those,
however, who have almost completed their journey, and
whose appointed tale of years has been wellnigh told, the
past seems but as yesterday, and the country they have
traversed, as they look back upon it from the Delectable
Mountains, lies at their feet marvellously foreshortened,
with every incident of their pilgrimage standing out in
magical distinctness. They can mark with regret, mingled
with wonder at their folly, their unaccountable deviations
from the direct route, their blind wanderings round and
about in the barren deserts of idleness or the thorny
thickets of misapplied endeavour, while they bewail with
many a sigh their neglect in not having started from the
outset with greater definiteness of purpose and a wiser
appreciation of what real life was, and of the use which
might be made of it. What, therefore, I would say to
you is this get clearly into your heads the fact that life
is a succinct, definite, circumscribed period of time, suffi-
ciently long to get a great deal done in it, and yet not
long enough to oppress us with the idea of exhausting
and unending effort. As children can be more readily
got to exert themselves when they know it is only for an



MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND A VA 337

hour at a time, so we grown men will find the burden and
heat of the day less wearisome if we are careful to re-
member that the orb of our existence is ceaselessly measuring
its rapid track towards the horizon, and that at the appointed
time the vesper-bell of evening will surely summon us to
repose. Take care, then, that on quitting these walls you
enter at once, as willing workmen, into the vineyard, lest
later on you should have to lament with the poet

So much to do, so little done,
Our thread of life a third part spun,
And yet its labours scarce begun ;
While, stealing downwards sun by sun,
The empty years in silence run
To darkness and oblivion,
Leaving behind them still unwon
A people's benediction.

In the next place, try and frame for yourselves before-
hand as clear and correct a conception as circumstances
may permit of the nature, incidence, and ultimate conditions
of whatever careers you are determined to follow, being
careful at the same time, before you choose your professions,
to get a right knowledge of your individual aptitudes, and
of the extent of your powers ; for I am convinced that our
usefulness, as well as our happiness, depends upon our work
being done in a congenial atmosphere, and that it is" much
better to choose a humbler, less promising, or less remun-
erative walk in life, in which we are certain of personal
satisfaction, than to commit ourselves to a more ambitious
employment which may perhaps prove distressing to our
tastes and unsuited to our faculties.

Another topic to which I would direct your attention
though perhaps you may smile at my doing so is the
necessity of attending to your health, and consequently of
acquiring some knowledge of the principles of hygiene. It
has always been a marvel to me how the youth of England
ever attain manhood, so inconceivably silly are the things
that schoolboys are perpetually doing, through simple ignor-
ance. But grown men at our universities are equally



338 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

careless, and ruin their constitutions, cripple themselves
for life, or destroy their nervous system, through neglect
of the commonest rules. Beading men are those who
most signally err in this particular for while the athletes
on the river or in the cricket- field follow the severest
regimen in order to keep their bodies fit for the impend-
ing exertion, the students live upon tea, neglect their
exercise, disdain fresh air, and sit up till any hour in the
morning ; and yet any doctor will tell you that our mental
functions, our memories, our attention, our powers of con-
tinuous application, are even more dependent for their
vigour and vitality on the general condition of our health
than is the play of our muscles. Moreover, there is
nothing more extraordinary than the trifling character of
the circumstances which will tilt the balance of our bodily
condition in the direction of health or of disease, or how
insignificant are the precautions which prove sufficient to
maintain our minds clear, cheerful, and elastic, and to
render the exercise of our faculties a delight and a
triumph, instead of leaving us to labour in an atmo-
sphere of inertness and despondency. But, on the other
hand, as youth is always prone to exaggeration, you must
be on your guard against allowing a reasonable solicitude
about your health to degenerate into the worst of tyrannies
that of hypochondria. Nor ought we to be less careful
of what I may call the hygiene of our souls, or rather of
our nervous systems ; for it is an undoubted fact that, as
men grow up from youth to manhood, there is developed
within their frames a certain nervous effervescence which,
unless wisely and manfully controlled, results either in
physical excesses or else in various forms of hysteria,
which sometimes take the shape of religious melancholy or
of extravagant or factitious religious enthusiasm, which only
too often proves not only unreal and evanescent, but the
herald of a deplorable and pernicious reaction. Remember,
therefore, that the healthiness and robustness of your nerves
and mental fibre are as worthy of cultivation as those of
your corporeal faculties. In this way you will keep your



MA RQ UESS OF D UFFERIN AND A VA 339

characters free from those morbid, sentimental, and vicious
growths which leave a human being neither man nor
woman.

Another matter connected with education which has
frequently struck me on looking back on my own past is,
that we do not make our pupils understand how much easier
is the mastery of various branches of learning than at first
sight may appear to be the case, of course I am not now
speaking of flights into the higher regions of abstruse science,
but of simple acquirements. And this occurs, I think, more
frequently with boys than with girls. A little girl is told
to learn a foreign language whether German, French, or
Italian and, without any misgivings on the subject, she
sets about acquiring it as a matter of course, in the firm
conviction that in so many months, Or at all events in a
year or two, she will have mastered it. But when has it ever
occurred to the imagination of the most sanguine little boy
that he would ever really know either Latin or Greek ? And
yet why should he not ? If a slip of a girl of ten or twelve
can be taught to read at sight any French or German book
without difficulty, why should our boys go on from eight
till two-and-twenty pounding away at Latin and Greek,
without being able in nine cases out of ten to do more than
blunder through a passage of some author they have pre-
viously got up ? My belief is that our whole method of
teaching the dead languages should be changed, that we
begin altogether at the wrong end, and that this initial mis-
take is never retrieved. I myself was introduced to the
Latin grammar when I was six years old, and to the Greek
Grammar a couple of years later ; and when I left Oxford
after fourteen years of uninterrupted application at these
two tongues, the most that I could do was to translate with
some sort of decency a few Greek plays, some books of
Herodotus, a little of Cicero, and some Virgil and Horace
that had already been carefully conned. Of course there
were many men of my own standing in Oxford whose
acquirements in ancient literature were infinitely more com-
plete and creditable ; but, as I said at the beginning of these



340 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

observations, it is the average student that I am keeping in
my mind, and I have no hesitation in saying that the great
majority of my contemporaries were not a whit better ini-
tiated in the classics than myself. Later in life I reflected
with shame on the paucity of my classical acquirements,
and I set myself down to learn Greek in the same way as
I would set about learning a modern language. The result
was, that although I had only spare moments of time to
give to the business, I soon found myself able to take up
any ordinary Greek poet or prose writer, and read what was
written as easily as I could French always, of course,
excepting a corrupt chorus or some of the more difficult
authors. Well, I believe boys ought to be taught in the
same way that is to say, they should begin with the voca-
bulary, long before they are bothered with the grammar,
that the acquisition of whatever tongue they take up should
be rendered interesting, and that the names of Virgil, Homer,
Horace, Cicero, and Herodotus should not be allowed to
stink in their nostrils for the rest of their lives by being
made the vehicles through which the grammar is drummed
into them.

Of course, it may be objected that this method of learn-
ing a classical language eviscerates the good to be obtained
from the disciplinary effects of the usually accepted process ;
but, in the first place, it is merely a question of the stage at
which the grammar should be taken up, for I am as much
an admirer of fine scholarship as any one ; and, in the next,
the mysteries of the grammar will be much better learnt at
a later period of our school life, when its origin, its historical
growth, and its inter-relationship in different tongues can
be properly explained to the pupil. Moreover, there are a
dozen different ways of training a boy's mind into habits of
accuracy ; and when the problem is to learn a language,
no matter whether it may be an ancient or a modern one, the
common-sense view is to follow whatever method enables
us to acquire it with the least expenditure of labour, time,
and annoyance. In any event, the grammar, when it is
taught, should be inculcated without the most precious



MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND A VA 341

authors of antiquity being degraded by the use to which
they are now put. Indeed, I should be inclined to prohibit
boys from opening any of these greater prose writers or poets
until they had learned to read Latin and Greek pretty
fluently by an independent process ; for of this I am sure,
that it is only after you know a language that you can really
properly appreciate the niceties either of its grammar and
construction, or of the style in which it is written. But, it
may be said, what are to be our schoolbooks if the usual
authors are to be tabooed ? Well, there are a few easy ones
which might be still retained, such as the so-called fables of
iEsop, together with some of the more interesting episodes
from Xenophon, Plutarch, Herodotus, and the first book of
Livy. There are also the Greek Eomances, one of them, by
the way, opening with as dramatic a scene as is to be found
in the most sensational modern novel. As for myself, the
only specimens of Greek literature which I ever really
enjoyed as a young learner, were the funny Scholastikoi
stories, which have ever since clung to my memory. But
why should not some of our clever young classical tutors
translate into simple Latin and Greek a few of our English
standard stories, or a set of interesting anecdotes, or even a
tale or two from the Arabian Nights, or a good novel ?
Why should not the more spirited of your own Border
ballads or Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome be * turned
into rhymed Latin metre, so as to stick for ever in the
child's recollection ? In India, the acquisition of Persian
has been greatly facilitated by Talbot's translation of
Robinson Crusoe into that language. It might be said
that the result would not be classical Latin or grammatical
Greek but what would that matter ? What you want to
drive into the boys' heads and memories is the vocabulary
and a knowledge of the meaning of the words, and this can
only be done by interesting them in the story, by exciting
their curiosity, by* making them eager to know what comes
next, and what it is that is concealed within the jargon of
sentences they are set down to read. How few of us there
are who would ever have acquired French if we had been



342 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

confined to Bossuet's sermons or Montesquieu's Treatise,
unaided by the blessed stimulus of Dumas' novels. If such
a plan as this were adopted, both Latin and Greek would be
acquired in half the time now taken to teach them, and we
should then disarm the enmity of those who would exclude
Greek from our university curriculum on account of its
acquisition being incompatible with that of practical sub-
jects. Moreover, men of twenty would no longer be matri-
culating at Oxford and Cambridge with less classical know-
ledge than they ought to have acquired when they left
their preparatory school, while for the rest of their lives the
golden-mouthed authors of antiquity would be a source of
endless delight and recreation, and the pious iEneas would
cease to be a stumbling-block and a rock of offence to the
ingenuous British schoolboy. For, gentlemen, I confess I
am inclined to range myself on the side of those who would
retain not only Latin, but also Greek, as an essential part
of the education of every gentleman. Indeed, I cannot
conceive the meaning of the term education if either Greek
or Latin is to be excluded. Nay, if one were to be compul-
sorily omitted, I would prefer dropping Latin rather than
Greek ; for, surely, if a choice has to be made, Herodotus,
Thucydides, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, Pindar
and Theocritus, are more precious possessions than even the
works of the Eoman authors, who, after all, only imitate
their style and reflect their genius. Has not Greek literature
been the quarry out of which the brightest gems in the
writings of our modern authors have been extracted ? Is
not Greek genius the divine source from which has sprung
the existing aftergrowth of European literature, philosophy,
art, and politics, while it is through the portals of Grecian
history, Grecian mythology, and Grecian tradition that we
find entrance into those dim mysterious regions peopled by
the primeval nations that sprung, flourished, and decayed
during a series of unnoted centuries on the banks of the
Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. How is it possible,
then, that any intelligent man with the slightest curiosity
or love of learning, or interest in the past, could be content



MARQUESS OF DUFFERIN AND A VA 343

to remain ignorant of a language, in itself the most beautiful
ever spoken by man, and that has embalmed for the benefit
of future ages such inestimable treasures of original thought
and far-reaching information ? Besides, where else will you
obtain, otherwise than in the stories of the Greek States,
such a marvellous or instructive Krieg spiel or rehearsal of
the course and possible contingencies of modern European
politics ? Put Eussia or America for Macedon, the unknown
quantity ; Germany and France for Thebes and Sparta ;
England for Athens ; China for the Empire of Darius, and
you see at a glance what may happen to an empire such
as ours. Like Great Britain, Athens was a small mother
country, with a splendid maritime jurisdiction and important
colonies, some of which turned against her in the day of
trouble, while her absolute existence the food of her people,
her revenues, and her commercial wealth depended on her
command of the sea. She loses a single naval battle, and
her imperium is for ever shattered, the violet crown falls
from her brows, her foremost citizens are either executed or
sold into slavery, and her name as a political entity fades
from the page of history.

Nor, gentlemen, can I see that the admitted desirability,
nay, necessity, of acquiring a knowledge of at all events
one modern European language, need in any degree interfere
with the claims of the classical tongues. During the four-
teen years which may be regarded as the educational period,
there should be ample time for the acquisition of both.
In most European countries, except perhaps France, the
children of the upper classes generally know two languages,
beside their own, before they are ten years old ; in Bussia
they all know three, and this independently of other studies.
What is to prevent the British youth doing as much by
the time he is twenty ? The late John Stuart Mill was,
I believe, of opinion that it is a waste of time to learn a
foreign language out of the country in which it is spoken,
and in this view I am inclined to agree, if there is any
prospect of the student ever being in a position to visit
for a certain number of months the country in question ;



344 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

but, even so, it would be well for him to obtain some slight
knowledge of it beforehand. Inasmuch, however, as it is
only the minority of young men to whom it is possible to
reside abroad, instruction in one European tongue should,
I think, be made an essential element in education. Nor
can there be any doubt that that language should be French;
for not only is its literature the most diverse and admirable
possessed by any European community except our own,
but it has long been accepted as the common channel of
communication between European nations. There is also
another reason which makes it more desirable to know
French than what probably may be considered the next
most useful language, namely, German. The genius of
French and English are so dissimilar, and the mould in
which they are cast so different, that they never can be
quite satisfactorily translated the one into the other.
Consequently, if a French author is really to be appreciated,
he must be read in the original. This is not the case as